Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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My car is 10 years old. It has one of the worst Ford engines ever made and it still drives flawlessly, everything is cheap to repair and maintain. It has a radio and climate control nothing more. It's also fairly fuel efficient.
Nothing new and improved ever gets cheaper over time, that's not how it works. Manufacturers thread the waters with increased prices and if people are willing to pay that price it becomes the new baseline. That's why flagship smart phones went from $400 to $600 to $800 to $1,000 and now $1,200. That's why small lower class cars went from $15,000 to $22,000 new. That's why the new PS5 pro cost $700, etc.
Ideally the price curve of a product starts inflated, drops rapidly and then plateaus at the actual free market value of the product. EVs lasting longer than combustion engine cars (which we have zero empirical evidence by the way) and therefore staying at an inflated price point for longer, benefits nobody but the manufacturer.
I would love to buy a 7 year old EV for $8000 used and have it be my daily car for another 3-4 years. But right now something like that doesn't exist, at least not in the form of a normal sized hatchback.
And rapid development is horrible for maintainability. With billions of possible part combinations even within a single manufacturers car class it becomes impossible for a professional mechanic to repair yet alone diagnose a problem without OEM tools. People have to finally step back from their desire for individualism and accept that for the greater good a unified technical design composition is superior. At least car manufacturers caught up on that, because nowadays cars come with a bunch of features pre-installed but not unlocked in the software, that way at least from a technical standpoint the cars are equal to one another and become simpler to maintain. But the customer still has to foot the bill for all features, driving the price up even more.
EVs have chosen an absolute shit time to emerge. If this change would have happenend in the early 2000s when the car market was relatively stable design wise we wouldn't have any of those problems. Combustion and electric engines would have been able to coexist like manuals and automatics, or diesel and petrol.